


Shine Until Tomorrow

by Canon_Is_Relative



Series: In More Than Name [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Childhood Memories, Dean Winchester and Sam Winchester in Love, Falling In Love, Family Drama, M/M, References to the Beatles, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Sibling Incest, Sibling Love, Stanford Era (Supernatural), Theology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-12 18:28:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28764834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canon_Is_Relative/pseuds/Canon_Is_Relative
Summary: The summer before his sophomore year at Stanford, Sam goes to stay with Pastor Jim for a week. He spends the time talking theology with Jim, reminiscing about staying at the parsonage as a kid…and getting drunk off communion wine while trying not to obsess over the fact that less than a week ago, he kissed his big brother.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Series: In More Than Name [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2108838
Comments: 6
Kudos: 13





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sequel to "In More than Name," the one where, instead of hiding Adam from them, John tells Sam and Dean as soon as he finds out that he has a third son. It’s also the one where, when they go to Windom to meet little Adam and his mother Kate, Sam and Dean end up kissing in the basement of Kate's house. This story picks up the morning after that kiss.
> 
> Title, of course, is from Paul McCartney's masterpiece 'Let It Be.'

MONDAY

“Sammy, wake up.”

“Don’ wanna.” Sam rolled his shoulders like he was unfurling his wings, like the reverent touch on his skin was smoothing out his feathers. He wanted to linger in the illusion a little longer.

“Sammy, Sammy, Sam-I-Am.” Dean was scratching at the back of his neck, the base of his skull. The fucker never played fair. “Adam just left for school. I made breakfast.”

Sam went still under his touch. Finally remembered to breathe when his ears started to ring. Turning his head just enough that he could open one eye and peer up at Dean, Sam caught his brother’s gaze and knew by the electricity crackling between them, by the flush over Dean’s cheeks that spread instantly up to his ears – but mostly by the way Dean ran his thumb over Sam’s bottom lip, his own lips parting on a shuddering breath – that it hadn’t been a dream. Last night was real, and neither of them was pretending it wasn’t.

They rolled off the lumpy basement couch and stumbled upstairs to the kitchen after – never mind that Sam would have sworn he’d never be hungry for anything but Dean again – his stupid stomach turned traitor and started up growling. Loudly.

Grinning at Sam with bacon grease slicking his already obscene lips, Dean nudged a plate of food forward and Sam tucked in, perched on a stool at the breakfast bar, kicking Dean after Dean kicked him first, spiking his coffee with salt when Dean turned his back for a minute, stealing the extra crispy strip of bacon off Dean’s plate. It was any morning from any day in their lives, only played out at a place utterly unlike anywhere they'd ever been before. A house with a breakfast bar, for God’s sake. A house they had keys to, that would still be there in a month, in a year. For a brief moment in time they were two brothers with nowhere else to be, spending the morning in the sunny kitchen, eating and laughing and scoring cheap shots off each other.

But after breakfast they retreated again, out of the sunlight, back down to the basement, back on the couch. Dean fiddled with the old VCR until he got it to run and they mainlined Star Wars and Mr. Pibb until they were both so loopy, so jittery, that they turned to each other, reached for each other at the same moment, like they’d planned it. Like Han telling Luke on the screen _Let's blow this thing and go home!_ had been some kind of signal and they clawed their way back to each other, making up for all the skittering near-misses of the morning; there on the couch like it was a safe zone, there where Sam had chosen Dean, right there where Dean had told Sam what he’d always known. _I'm crazy about you, Sammy_.

Sense-memory was overwhelming. His head spinning from caffeine and the remembered feel of half-waking in the night, tight against Dean, the most incredible rush of ecstasy racing beneath his skin, on fire as pleasure built and built in a feedback loop between them, crescendoing to a mighty roar.

Dean hadn’t stopped him the night before but he did that afternoon, closing his hands around Sam’s wrists, drawing them out from where he hadn’t noticed he’d slipped them up under the hem of Dean’s t-shirt. He pressed Sam’s hands flat against his chest instead, his heart going a mile a minute beneath Sam’s palms, and tipped forward to press his forehead against his little brother’s, rolling their skulls together and closing his eyes. 

Sam tried to speak but it was like his mouth had forgotten how to do anything but kiss Dean. They needed to talk, he knew they needed to talk, but he may as well have had a spell placed on him, one that obliterated all thoughts from his mind before they could be fully formed. All he was left with was a swirling mass of impulses, desire he hadn't known he was capable of, and he communicated all of it to Dean the only way he could figure out how.

Dean didn’t let them go any farther than that, though, hands above the waist and outside the clothes like they were in middle school or something, but it didn’t matter to Sam. He'd never get enough of his brother. It had only been a few hours but he already knew that for certain, so for the time being the shades of _not enough_ didn't matter to him. Dean let Sam kiss him, and didn't make him speak, and it was not enough and it was better than anything.

A little later on, Dean’s phone rang out shrill in the quiet of the park down the block from Adam’s school. Sam slid around Dean and slipped his hand into his brother’s back pocket to palm the phone. He held it out of reach, grinning, but the play had gone out of Dean and he yanked Sam close, fingers on his wrist as he prized the phone from his grasp. Sam shook Dean off, glaring now, and stormed a few paces away when Dean answered.

Sam couldn’t hear Dad’s voice, but the conversation played out clear as anything in Dean's shoulders as he said _Yes, Sir_ and _When_ and _Where_ and _We're just waiting to pick Adam up from school in fifteen minutes_ and reminded Dad that _Sammy’s bus ticket’s not ’til next week._

“You can’t go,” Sam said, as soon as Dean snapped the phone shut. Dean didn’t look at him, didn't un-hunch, and Sam crossed the distance he’d put between them, snapping like a rubber band back to Dean’s side. “Dean, not—you can’t, not yet—”

“Get off me,” Dean muttered, pushing at Sam and reaching for his jacket where he’d slung it over a park bench.

“ _Dean!_ ”

“What!” Dean tugged viciously on his collar and turned to glare at Sam. “What, Sammy? What do you want me to do, huh?”

Sam was sweating in his t-shirt, naked under Dean’s eyes where he stood armor-clad in leather and orders. He reached out for Dean, twisting his fingers in the hem of his shirt. All his carefully planned arguments, so convincing in his head, had fled, banished by the sound of Dad’s ringtone.

“I want you to. To come with me. Come to California with me.”

“Sam…”

“Dean, please. Just, please, don’t go with him. Come with me.”

Dean’s eyes went wide before all his defenses slammed back into place, making his face look like a stranger’s. Hunched under his jacket, voice low, Dean asked, “Really?”

Sam rocked back on his heels, spread his arms. “What?”

“After what we, after last year — after all this crap, dammit, Sam, I just got this family back together and now you wanna lay this on me, make me choose between you?”

“Dean, I didn’t—”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t mean it like that, Sammy, you knew exactly what you were saying.”

“Dean!”

“What the hell do you expect me to do in California, anyway? Huh? You got this all figured out, you tell me this: where the hell do I fit in your apple pie life?”

Sam almost laughed, because of all the stupid questions, he hadn't expected that to be the first. “You’ll do anything you want to do, you fit in with me because that’s where you’re supposed to be, man! We’ll figure it out, Dean, you can do whatever you want.”

“Jesus,” Dean hung his head, shaking it slowly, then looked up to meet Sam’s eyes, looking exhausted. “Man, I don’t know how to make you get it. I been doing exactly what I want to be doing. This is where I’m supposed to be, Sam, going after the thing that killed Mom, hunting evil sons of bitches—”

“With Dad,” Sam broke in, bitter.

“With you too, you moron, but you’ve made it pretty crystal fuckin’ clear that you're not in and I’m done fighting you on that, Sammy. You got your own life to live and I ain’t gonna drag you back into the dirt with me if that’s not where you wanna be. You being unhappy is the only thing worse than me being unhap—”

Sam knew he’d broadcasted the swing because he also knew he didn’t actually want to hit his brother. Dean dodged and grabbed his arm, twisted it up behind his back to hold him steady while Sam spit and swore at him. Dean wrapped one arm around Sam’s shoulders, Sam’s back against his chest, and just held on. It reminded Sam so much of when he’d been little, a sad and angry kid prone to fits of hysterics, how Dean would wrap himself around Sam, holding him tight and safe and protected from the demons inside and out until Sam’s rage had worn itself out in railing against the world and he’d fall asleep in his brother’s arms. It made Sam go limp, made him sag against Dean and let his big brother take his weight. 

That was Monday. Dean left with Dad on Monday.

WEDNESDAY

Sam managed to stay with the Milligans for two more days before he called Pastor Jim, an hour down the road in Blue Earth.

Without Dean there to charm Kate and entertain Adam, Sam had felt more and more out of place and in the way and painfully lonely, after that too-brief taste of what could have been. Still, he was stubbornly determined not to abandon Kate and Adam without more than an hour’s notice. In that way at least he could set himself apart from Dad and Dean.

Only, he didn't want to be apart from Dean. Literally or metaphorically. He wanted to be with Dean, but Dad had taken him away. He wanted to be there, with his newfound family in their cozy, normal house in Nowhere, MN, but he didn’t belong there. So Sam called Jim and asked if he could stay with him for a few days before catching his bus back to Stanford.

THURSDAY

Sam had no illusions as to how he and Dean ranked with Adam: Dean was the kid’s favorite. Sam could sympathize, and didn’t begrudge it. Sam had never been much good with kids, not even when he was a kid himself. He loved Adam, though, and left on their own they found things to talk about after all, ways to relate to each other, that Sam hadn’t expected. The kid was a voracious reader, his love of books instilled in him by his mom and deepened over long hours left alone as he grew up. Sparks of interest in science were being fanned into full-burn passion now that he was in middle school with _A real lab_ and _real dissections,_ _too!_ So Sam told him stories of cow eyes and cat brains from his own school days, and suddenly Big Brother Sam was pretty cool, too.

And even besides all that, Sam had access to a limitless source of wealth: of everyone in the world, he was the only one with nineteen years’ worth of stories about Dean and Dad stored in his brain, and to Adam, these were gold. 

It was dizzying, actually, when Sam first realized that for all the things Adam had that Sam wanted for himself — which was, honestly, almost everything in the kid’s life — Sam had something worth coveting, too. He’d been the one to grow up with a brother who loved him so fiercely that, through all the shit life threw at them, he’d always had that one thing he never had to question. As pissed as he was with Dean for leaving him, when Adam asked to hear stories Sam was always ready to indulge him, discovering as he did just how far back this entanglement went, how deeply rooted in his own sense of self his big brother was.

Dean had always been in arm’s reach, the bedrock of Sam’s very existence, the meaning of _Dean_ so broad and deep that Sam didn’t have words for it, had never needed to. The one time he’d tried, Mr. Wyatt had given him an “A” and deemed his experience of his family a work of fiction -- brilliant but fantastic -- and that was that. 

“Dean’s a good big brother,” Adam declared after Sam finished one last story, sitting on the front porch Thursday afternoon, waiting for Pastor Jim.

“He is,” Sam agreed, mostly not lying. “He’s the best. Well, almost the best,” he added, nudging Adam’s knee with a grin. “There’s me.” 

Adam looked up at him, confusion and childish guilt on his face, and Sam actually laughed out loud. 

“I’m joking. Of course Dean’s the best.” Adam gave a relieved nod, and Sam stood and stretched as Pastor Jim’s old pickup truck came into view down the block. _Of course he’s the best. He loves me._ Sam reached for his duffel, trying to duck away before the vicious voice in his head could intrude: _But not enough._

Sam thought he’d been lonely last year at Stanford. Looking down at the little brother sitting on the porch steps, contemplating the solitude that unfurled like a cloak behind him with no brothers, no father, a mother working overtime, Sam learned a new definition of the word. He ached for his little brother. But he longed for his Dean. It was only Thursday, and Sam was so lonely he thought he might die from it.

Kate came out onto the porch as Jim was getting out of his truck. She smiled and shook his hand, saying how nice to know there was a friend of the family so close by. Jim, tall and lean and somehow warm despite his austere dress, folded both her hands in his and told her that any family of John Winchester was as good as family to him, and he was only a phone call away should she ever need anything.

Kate surprised Sam then by turning and putting her arms around him while Jim bent to speak to Adam, and then handing him a bag full of snacks for his long bus ride. “Remember what I said,” she smiled up at him, squeezing his arm. “Call me any time, for anything. And think about winter break, okay? I’ve got a space heater for the basement.” 

In Jim’s pickup, the windows down and NPR playing softly on the radio, Sam leaned back in his seat, watching the scenery. The Minnesota sky was a brilliant blue overhead, the road straight like a furrow dug through endless fields of emerald corn. When the news switched over to classical music, Jim reached forward to turn the volume down even further, catching Sam’s eye with the motion. He glanced over at the preacher to find Jim’s eyes fixed on him for a brief moment before returning his attention to the road.

“I was surprised to hear from your father, the other day,” Jim said. “I’m sorry that my intel cut short your family visit.”

“Wait, what?” Sam turned in his seat. “You were the one gave him the lead on the weres down in Georgia?”

Jim nodded. “He called me up to ask if I’d heard of any hunts in the area.”

“Of course he did,” Sam said, his teeth grinding together in his jaw.

Jim considered Sam for a few long moments before saying mildly, “Now that I know what he’s got invested in the area, I’m inclined to say he was asking out of a personal desire to keep the place safe. But I didn’t know that when he called, I just told him no, it’s been pretty quiet around here lately, but I had picked up some news from down south. I’d been about to call Bobby Singer and ask if he had anyone he could put on it.”

“Bobby,” Sam said with a slight smile. “How is the old man?”

“Still kicking, still drinking his weight in gut-rot. Asks after you when we speak, he knows you keep in touch with me for news of your family. But for this were job, truth was I hadn’t even thought of your father, last I heard the two of them were out west.”

“They were,” Sam said. “Last May. Showed up at Stanford without any warning, to tell me about…” Sam waved a hand by his head, indicating the road behind them. Windom and Adam and all the rest of it.

“That must have been quite unsettling,” Jim glanced at Sam again, his face open and inviting confession, as always. “For them to appear in your new life like that, bearing such unexpected news.”

Sam shrugged, not wanting to dwell on how he'd reacted, all those months ago. “It wasn't so unexpected, knowing Dad. I mean it wasn't like a shock, though if you ask Dean…Dean’s been a complete…” Sam launched into a fractured version of the fairy tale that had been their lives the last couple of weeks and months. The way Dean had seemed compelled to bring Adam into their family circle while Sam begged him to leave the kid alone. The world didn't need another Winchester in the impala, and Sam had thought that he didn't need another brother. He had no way to explain what had shifted in him, changing his understanding of the word _brother_ now that he had two people to apply it to, and he wasn’t about to try and explain anything of what had happened between himself and Dean, anyway. As he stumbled over his words and retractions, he just crossed his fingers and chose to believe that Jim was familiar enough with these kinds of stories that he’d hear the truth for what it was and let the lies slide without offense.

“You know what was weird, though?” Sam asked as they passed the sign for Blue Earth. “When I knocked on their door the first time, it wasn't until Kate was standing right in front of me, a real live person, it wasn't until right then that I realized I'd been expecting to see Mary. To see my mom, I mean.”

“When you find yourself in times of trouble…” Jim said quietly, then let the silence stretch on for a minute while Sam swallowed hard against the unexpected wave of emotion that had followed just the saying of her name.

The fact that Sam didn't feel his mother as something – someone – real had caused discord between himself and Dean any number of times over the years. But just now… It must have been linking her with Kate just now, saying Mary's name while thinking of Kate, who was warm and vital and very much alive, that seemed to bring her to life at last. He looked over at Jim, and found the pastor watching him, smiling slightly.

“Speaking of the holy mother,” Jim said, “I'm preaching on the Annunciation this Sunday and in my preparations I found myself remembering our conversation of several years ago.”

Sam snorted, grateful for the diversion. “'Several'? That was like a million years ago. What was I, fourteen?”

“Your questions and your insights at the time seemed far beyond those of a typical fourteen-year-old. Do you remember asking me if birthing the Messiah was Mary's destiny, and Gabriel showing up to tell her about it just a formality?”

Sam laughed, embarrassed, remembering very well how clever he'd thought he was, surprised back then to find Jim taking him seriously and surprised now to find that he still remembered it. “Yeah, and we ended up talking about whether Mary could have said 'No' instead of 'Let it be.' Free will and agency being absolutely crucial to true faith and…all that.”

“Yes,” Jim smiled as he slowed the truck for the turn into the church driveway. “All that.”

The gravel crunched under the tires the same as it had always done, and Sam spared a moment to have a mental argument with Dean that gravel was gravel – you couldn’t tell it apart from once place to another. But instead of his brother grabbing his duffel and hoisting it up over his shoulder and into the house, Jim helped him carry his things into the parsonage and up the narrow steps. Light was streaming into the tiny attic room through the stained-glass window that was a match in miniature for the one behind the altar in the adjoining church. Jim left him to settle in, closing the door and leaving Sam alone there in the so-familiar room with its slanting roof and colorful sunlight and the one little bed he used to share with Dean.

SATURDAY

Alone in the darkened sanctuary, Sam was getting drunk off communion wine.

It was only his third time ever being really intoxicated, and the first time without Dean’s voice in his ear. First was that night last year, his first college party, with Dean on the phone. That had been the last time they talked before Dean showed up with Dad on Adam’s advent into their lives. Second was last week, beers in Kate’s basement, their little brother asleep two floors above them while below Sam kissed his big brother like the world would end if he didn’t. Last time they talked before Dean disappeared with Dad again.

Now Sam was all alone in the silent church. Pastor Jim was out for the evening, maybe all night, keeping some kind of death vigil for one of his parishioners in hospice or something. He’d left in a hurry, asking Sam to lock up and set the salt after him and barely waiting for an answer.

Sam had been in a foul mood even before Jim knocked on his door and decided he pretty much didn’t care if demons or felons broke into the place, he didn’t want to leave his room. He held out for half an hour before slumping into the church with guilt -- and exasperation at the stupid guilt -- weighing down his shoulders. As he’d reached out to flip off the lights in the nave, he’d seen that Jim had run off in the middle of setting up for tomorrow’s service. A bottle of wine stood uncorked on the table of the holy sacrament. Two minutes of opening cupboards and he found the rest of the stash. 

“I’m not stupid,” Sam told his absent brother. “I wasn’t gonna take the open one.” Jim may be sharper than most, but Sam didn’t think he’d spot that one bottle out of the crowded cabinet was missing. Dean-in-his-head was busy assuring Sam that yeah, actually, Sam _was_ stupid. Dean-in-his-head was still worrying about him getting caught, nearly as much as he was glowing with pride at Sam’s daring.

“Well you’re not here, so what does it matter to you?” 

Dean should have called today. That was the rule, call every third day. He'd called on Wednesday, but Sam was starting to wonder if that had been coincidence, if he'd forgotten about the rule. Or if he'd decided that the rules didn't matter anymore, with Sam less than a week away from going back to Stanford. Sam had sprinted down to Kate’s basement on Wednesday, soon as he saw Dean's name glowing on his cell’s caller ID. Sunk down on the sagging couch that he and Dean had so recently shared, so that they could talk alone.

But Dean wouldn't talk to him. Sam had even asked, 'Is Dad there with you?' He wasn't, but Dean was still talking like John was there listening in to every word. Scoffing when Sam asked if he was okay, groaning about being nagged and bitched at when Sam asked him to be careful, asked if he'd be able to swing by before he left for school, asked when they'd be able to see each other next. Asking, asking, asking.

“It's not like I was asking you to say that you miss me. Jerk.” The words came out garbled around the lip of the bottle. Sam took two big swallows and leaned back on the altar steps, glowering up at the arched ceiling of the nave, vaulting away to nothingness above him.

He could remember clearly when he first learned that the word _nave_ was related to the word _nautical_ , by way of whatever root was also in _navy._ He’d been in a lot of churches already by that point in his short life, but it was always Pastor Jim’s that he thought of, when he thought of _Church._ The way the wooden beams keeled overhead in that perfect arced flight like the bones of a ship. He remembered the day he stopped wrestling with his inability to express his marrow-deep understanding of why the early Christian church had taken the ship as one of its symbols, and accepted that it simply made sense whether he could describe it or not. He’d been here alone then, too. Dad and Dean off God-knew-where and leaving Sam to sleep alone in the same creaky bed in the parsonage attic. It had felt huge back then, much too large for just one small boy by himself. 

“All the lonely people,” he said out loud, and laughed, and drank again. The bottle was more than half empty, and he put it down on the floor between his feet. Between one heartbeat and the next it wasn’t funny anymore, that he was drinking alone and talking to an imaginary version of his brother. It would be a week soon, soon it would be seven lonely days since Dean left without a hug or even a punch to his shoulder, nothing but the guilt in his eyes acknowledging what had just passed between them.

Tomorrow, it would be a week since Sam fell asleep blanketed in his brother, and the day after that would be a week since he woke in the morning to pressure between his shoulder blades, a knuckle bumped down the stairs of his spine.

_Sammy, wake up._

_I'm crazy about you, Sammy_.

Sam moaned quietly, pressing his palm to his crotch and fighting the urge to dig his heels into the floor and rut up against his own hand.

He imagined Dean's hands, instead. Closing around his wrists and stopping him, as he'd stopped him that afternoon on the couch. He lifted his hands to rest on either side of his head, palm-up, supplication or surrender. It lasted less than a minute.

'You okay?' Sam texted his brother. Saturday, that’s what his phone said. It was Saturday night, still. Sam was still lying on the floor in the empty church, but now the bottle of communion wine was empty.

He made himself stay awake until his phone lit up and then then he let the words on the screen, 'We're good, call you tomorrow,' carry him into unconsciousness.

SUNDAY

Pastor Jim finally broke the silence that Sam had thought might actually stretch on forever.

The wine was to blame for how he'd sat hunched over the toilet for half an hour in the morning before he could even come out and meet Jim's eyes, but the pastor's words now made him feel worse than any possible hangover:

“Sam, did something happen with Dean?”

They were in the sanctuary, an hour after the service had ended. Sam was doing what he was pretty sure was supposed to be penance, helping Jim touch up the warding and protection sigils all around the church. Without being obvious about it he'd been keeping as far away as he could from the spot where Jim had found him passed out but now, traitors that they were, his eyes leapt to the altar steps and stuck there, his mind slamming on the brakes and refusing to consider what might lie behind Jim's tone.

It was August, but Sam felt a chill like an icy breeze whisper against his neck, carrying with it a memory from a few years ago. Dad off on a hunt, Sam and Dean crashing here together. Sam watching Dean chopping firewood in the snow, his heart so full of _something_ as he watched his brother swing the heavy axe that Sam had felt hot tears prickle against his cold cheeks even as the sensation of being watched prickled down his spine. He'd looked up to see Pastor Jim watching them from the window, his eyes fixed on whatever was shining from Sam’s face. 

Sweat broke out on Sam’s upper lip now and he looked down at his hands, white-knuckled around the ancient book and the brand-new paintbrush. _Jim can’t know. He’ll tell Dad. Dad will kill Dean_. It wasn't the first or even hundred and first time he'd thought it over the past week, but the terror hit him suddenly right between his collar bones and the weight of it, of having this one thing, this one single good thing that had ever happened to him, having to keep it a deadly secret, it was too much. Sam watched his fingers uncurling one at a time and thought that he could not possibly survive feeling this lonely for the rest of his life.

Jim was just looking at him, patient and calm as ever, waiting for his answer. Sam carefully wiped the excess paint from his brush, mind whirring. The truth may be a lost cause for him, but he was a Winchester; he’d been talking around the truth for as long as he’d known what it was. And something _had_ happened, after all.

“I,” Sam began, and the breath he drew in to fuel the words caught up sharp on the way to his lungs, made his chest heave, and he bent to put down the book and brush before they could betray his shaking hands. His empty stomach constricted and he pressed his fists to his eyes, the hollow feeling expanding like a balloon and filling up with words all trying to force their way out at once through his blocked throat. “I tried to get him to quit the life. I asked him to leave Dad and come back with me, to California. And I. I really thought he. But,” Sam barked a laugh and looked out the window, gulping for a moment before continuing. “I was an idiot, I should have known. He chose Dad and hunting and I just know that sooner or later you'll be calling me to say the worst has finally happened and I. I don’t know, Pastor Jim. He called _me_ selfish for asking him to quit and save himself and I can’t make him _see._ ”

Jim was quiet until he finished carving whatever sigil he was working on into one of the stone pillars, then hung the old tapestry back in place to cover it. It was a depiction of Mary on the donkey, one hand folded protectively over her enormous belly. Sam blinked rapidly and looked back at Jim once his breath was coming easier.

“Sam. If we got the thing that took your mother. If we killed it tomorrow. What do you see happening? What do you think Dean would do?”

Sam gave a bitter grin. “Get drunk off his ass and sleep for a week?”

Jim raised an eyebrow. “Is that what you were doing in here last night; practicing for that happy day?”

Sam flushed and shook his head. “I'm sorry, I'm really—”

But Jim cut him off. “So, after Dean celebrates, whatever form that takes, what then?” 

“Then…I don’t know, something. Anything.”

“Something, anything,” Jim echoed, turning a page in his journal and then looking back up at Sam. “Something like leaving other families to suffer the same way yours did?”

Sam bristled immediately, but Jim raised a hand. “It’s possible that one day your brother might leave the hunting life, but it’s not going to happen until he learns to see the world in different terms than that.”

Sam slumped against the wall. “That’s why he thinks I’m selfish,” he muttered. Jim hummed noncommittally. “God, he’s so black and white! Life must be so fu—so _simple_ for him.”

“If you’ll allow an outsider to venture an opinion about your family…?” Jim was looking at him, Sam could see from the corner of his eyes. He gave no reaction and Jim ventured his opinion anyway. “Your brother grew up on the road, often the sole caretaker for a little boy — sometimes his sole _provider_ — from an age when he still desperately needed caretaking himself. If the world seems black and white to Dean, I’d hazard a guess that it’s because that’s how he needed the world to be to survive in it this long with his sanity intact.”

Sam narrowed his eyes. “Are you calling my brother stupid?”

The sound echoed all throughout the sanctuary as Jim actually threw back his head and loosed the belly laugh, surprisingly deep for a man of his thin frame, that Sam remembered from a dozen Sunday dinners over the years. Sam felt himself blushing, only vaguely aware of what Jim had found so funny. “Woe betide the man who comments on one Winchester in the presence of another. No, Sam, I don’t think that Dean is stupid, in fact I think he is as far from being stupid as the young man who got himself the full ride to Stanford.”

Sam didn’t know what to make of that so he just nodded and pushed his hair back from his face. It felt greasy and gritty both and he was suddenly disgusted with himself. What was _wrong_ with him, sulking around, blaming Dean, stealing from and disrespecting this holy place. He was supposed to be better than this. He'd thought that he was, until the revelation that he wasn't alone in occupying that strange place that was outside of both normalcy and perversion; that place where loving your brother was the only right path, the only certain truth. His jaw was sore and he made himself stop clenching his teeth, made himself look up at Jim and smile, vowing silently to get his act together and shut up about Dean from now on. Jim was a hell of a lot more observant than Dad was, saw Dean and Sam as more than just a good little soldier and a smart-mouthed kid, and he’d seen…whatever he’d seen, all those years ago in the snow.

“I'm sorry, Pastor Jim,” he said. “I don't know what got into me last night, I mean, yeah it's been a rough few… It's always been rough, it's not an excuse. I was way out of line and I'm sorry.”

Jim climbed up the ladder to begin detaching another tapestry from the other side of the pillar. He waited until Sam was standing beneath his with his arms upstretched before saying, “You've born witness to that particular coping mechanism your whole life, you can hardly be blamed for wanting to try it out for yourself. But that behavior is not a solution, Sam, it doesn't become you and it doesn't belong here. Is that understood?”

Sam said, “Yes, sir,” and caught the edge of the tapestry, carefully rolling it as Jim lowered it down to him. It had to be taken out and shook free of a decade's accumulation of dust before Jim could inspect it, make sure that the warding in the warp and the weft still held true.

Outside, after Sam had sneezed about fifty times and his eyes finally stopped watering, he laid out the tapestry, marveling at how intricate it was, how beautiful, how here and there it glimmered and shone in the afternoon sunlight. He couldn't tell if it was magic or just mundane metallic thread, but the sight calmed him. It was very old, not exactly ancient but definitely pre-industrial, and yet here it still was. Enduring, lasting; an icon of strength and love and promise. Sam ran his fingers over the woven figure's lovely face, yet more dust motes rising in his wake, and as he gathered her gently back into his arms he began humming, hardly noticing that he was doing it until he regained the hushed silence of the sanctuary.

_When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me…_


	2. Chapter 2

FIVE YEARS AGO

Sam discovered the Beatles at the same time he took religion for a trial run. He was fourteen, staying with Pastor Jim, Dad and Dean on a hunt while Minnesota turned white around them and Christmas crept closer. 

Pastor Jim was busy — obviously, ’twas the season — but he still gave Sam as much of his attention as Sam dared to ask for. He'd talk to him as Sam followed him around for all of Advent, explaining everything about what he was doing, the scriptural history and traditions that had grown from them. Sam’s habitual longing for a normal holiday took a sharp left turn that year, somewhere between fitting the little Sunday school kids for shepherd gowns and reading the story of the Annunciation for himself.

One afternoon, Jim asked Sam to keep himself scarce. There were some hunters coming through, Jim said, hunters that he didn’t quite trust, and he wanted to deal with them quickly and without complications. (Sam nodded and locked himself in Jim’s study, sitting with his back to the door for a while with his fists pressed against his eyes, refusing to give in to the thick lump in his throat. He wasn’t about to cry just because someone had acted like he deserved an explanation instead of an order.) A few hours later, Jim knocked and unlocked the door to find Sam lying on his back on the floor with real tears in his eyes, Jim’s old Beatles LPs in a stack beside the turntable.

Sam had been mesmerized by “Let it Be.” By that _something_ so reverent in Paul McCartney’s voice, as he sang to his lost mother — of course her name was Mary, why wouldn’t it be — and in his devotional repetition of the invocation, _Let it be_.

Sam was smart. He was only fourteen but he'd heard it a million and one times from the teachers at the million and one schools he'd already attended by then. He was used it, used to the feeling of his mind flexing and stretching to accommodate new information. He spent hours alone reading, watching documentaries, eavesdropping on adults; he'd become used to the way connections would blaze to life, sometimes seemingly out of nowhere, forging new trails in his brain and enticing him to follow along. But he'd found that, the closer he got to anything that might be truly important, personally meaningful, the harder it was for him to articulate that feeling of rightness, and words would fail him as a means to communicate the way his web of connections was making the world make sense.

Over dinner with Jim that night, feeling as helplessly incoherent as when he'd tried to talk about the symbolism of the ship of the church -- but much more determined this time -- Sam tried to explain what Paul McCartney was saying _._ _Come to me, be with me, abide with me:_ it was a layman’s lyrical echo of the Virgin Mary’s own 'Let it be,' that holy invitation, _Let it be with me according to your word,_ Sam was sure that it had to be. This was someone else who understood Mary's expression of devotion, that her humble acceptance of absolute servitude to God did not rule out celebration of her incredible power as a vessel of God. 

They listened to the album together after dinner, Sam's eyes flitting between the record player and the telephone because it was day three of their hunting trip and Dean was due to call. As the evening drew on and Sam started to worry, Jim told Sam that he didn’t think that Paul McCartney wrote the song with these themes intentionally. Forgetting about the too-silent phone Sam turned to him, ready to be profoundly disappointed, but he wasn't finished. According to Jim -- whose word Sam had never had a reason to doubt before so why start with questioning his knowledge of rock and roll lore – McCartney had said, when asked about religious symbolism in 'Let it Be,' “You can take it that way it you want. I think it’s a great thing to have faith of any sort given the world we live in.” 

Jim and Sam went on talking late into the night about the idea of divine inspiration and truth transcending intent; the definition of a prophet as an inspired proclaimer and the etymology of _inspiration_ as related to _respiration_ : the breath of life and animation. Just before going up to bed, Sam asked how old Paul McCartney had been when his mother died. He climbed the stairs slowly, thinking about the answer. Pulling his pajamas out from under his pillow where he buried them every morning in a vain attempt to keep them warm in the drafty room, he let himself imagine what it would have been like to have his own mother alive for the last fourteen years, to be losing her only now.

He was in bed with the quilt pulled up to his ears when he realized that Dean had never checked in. Shame slithered hot through his limbs and left him shivering. What was wrong with him, fantasizing about his dead mother and forgetting about his dad and brother, who might be in danger, who might not be coming back. He made himself stay awake to listen for the phone, rousing from a feverish dream around dawn when the sound of wailing cries for help inside his head resolved into the shrill of the telephone downstairs. Crouching by his cracked-open door, shivering so hard he thought Jim would hear his bones rattle, he listened to the pastor talking to his father, saying, “Good” and “I'll tell him” and “glad to hear it, John, we'll see you in a couple days.”

Creeping back to bed, Sam watched the crisp winter light creep across the floor towards his bed, transformed into something warm and sacred by the stained-glass window.

Sam had been happy to keep his conversation with Jim the night before a bit abstract; musing about music and faith and what it all meant had been no less fascinating for being theoretical. But as day began to break, washing Sam in vivid stained-glass hues that seemed almost solid to the touch, what Jim had said kept worrying at him like a grain of sand in a shell. Knowing that this sunrise was bringing him one day closer to the re-advent of his father, Sam suddenly felt an urgent need to ask the sort of question that would have turned his own father temporarily deaf. 

_It's good to have faith, given the world we live in_. That's what Jim had said. _The world we live in_. So, how had the world come to be like this? That was what Sam wanted to know and that was what he asked Jim on the morning of Christmas eve. What did the Bible say about the things his father hunted through the night? 

“Plenty,” Jim said with a smile, elbows-deep in steaming dishwater. The Bible had 'plenty' to say about good and evil and demons and the like but of more interest – according to Jim – it also gave a great deal of space to stories about how to make your way in the world for good. Sam shook his head when Jim asked if he remembered the sermon from last time he and Dean were staying there, an exploration around the convergence of Colossians 1 and Genesis 2.15. _The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it._ It was an instruction manual, Jim had preached, and it was imperative for all those who claim to follow in Christ's footsteps to gain understanding of the Hebrew words for “till” and “keep.”

“This is the foundation of the idea of reciprocal care,” Jim told him, as Sam dried the last of the breakfast dishes. “We are not just people free to take and take from the earth. By tending to the earth — whether that be environmentally or in the casting out of demons — we are engaging in dynamic worship of God’s power and God’s greatest gift. Colossians says that Jesus is the second Adam, after the first Adam failed in his tending of the garden. Whether you want to look at it metaphorically or literally, you can say that humans let evil into the world. Look at the things we hunt; man may not have _created_ evil, but without invitation, the devil might not have been able to proliferate his evil in the world.”

Sam celebrated Christmas Eve with Jim and his church, raising his candle with the rest of the congregation on the final verse of Silent Night and marveling at how much light a few dozen tiny flames could produce. _With the dawn of redeeming grace. Shine until tomorrow._ Dad and Dean showed up the next day, Dean bringing him a pack of red vines and a Justice League comic book wrapped in the funny pages of a local paper, and two days after that they were back on the road.

For the next couple of years, things were good. Between Pastor Jim and Bobby, Sam was supplied with all the books of lore and history and mysticism that he could possibly want and Dean and Dad's ribbing about his nerdy habits took on a measure of fondness, even respect, when his research began to impact their hunts. _Dynamic worship_ , Sam would think, watching Dad and Dean sprinting back towards the car with victory writ all over their faces, watching Dean hoist his gun in the air when he caught sight of Sam, grinning. It lasted a good long while, this feeling that what he was doing was capital-G Good; he was a custodian of the Earth and what his family did was noble and worthwhile and necessary. When the questions, the doubt, began to creep back in, at first he resisted them as though they were whispers from the devil himself. _Why us? Why me?_ Sam hadn't ever done anything wrong, neither had Dean. Maybe their dad was paying for some past sin they didn't know about but Pastor Jim had rejected the idea of sons paying for the sins of the father as much as he denounced the idea of original sin. As the years wore Sam down, though, he couldn't keep it up. Couldn't follow Dean’s example and accept their dad's philosophy whereby the simple fact that there was evil in the world that meant that he had to subsume his whole life to hunting it.

“We do what we do so other people can enjoy life, Sammy, we're making it safe for them to live their apple pie lives none the wiser about what's really out there.”

“And so that means we never get to enjoy life for ourselves, we're just slaves to cleaning up a mess that we didn’t even make? And it's _Sam._ ”

Dean would eventually grow so weary of bearing the brunt of Sam's rage that he'd stop even responding, but in the beginning he would laugh and offer to get Sam a better fake ID, a bigger gun, a lap dance. “Loosen up, _Sam_ , there's plenty to enjoy about this life. You probably wrecked your eyes with all those fancy books, that's why you're too blind to see it.”

In the end, though, it was Dean who was blind. Dean who was caught absolutely off-guard when Sam announced he was leaving, despite that Sam felt he'd been flying his warning flags from the top of every flagpole they passed for the last two years. In the end, Dean hadn't stopped Sam from leaving. In the end, blind with hurt or rage or desperation, Dean hadn't stopped Sam from kissing him.


	3. Chapter 3

NOW

Dean called in the afternoon. Sam answered after the second ring, unwilling to come across too eager, unable to risk making Dean wait any longer.

“Sammy, hey. You okay?”

Sam's stomach had finally settled enough to allow him to eat a little lunch once he'd stopped tasting wine on the back of his tongue, though the wobbly feeling in his legs hadn't abated. He had to wonder how people like his dad and brother dealt with their regular hangovers if they were always this bad. Or maybe in this, as in all things, he was the outlier, the freak who just couldn't get it right. He'd gone outside after helping Jim clean up, seeking shelter in the shade of the overgrown copse that he would swear used to be bigger. They'd played hide-and-seek there, once upon a time, but now Sam couldn't find a single decent hiding spot. He sank down on a mossy log and rubbed his forehead.

“I'm fine. What's up?”

“Another one bites the dust,” Dean said, smug and satisfied. “Got those wolfy sons of bitches before they took out anyone else, even found the kid. Broken leg, way too many stitches, but she's gonna be fine. You checked in with Adam since you left?”

Sam blinked, his surroundings seeming to take a swift one-eighty turn. Adam? _Jesus was the second Adam, after the first Adam failed in his tending of the garden_. Oh. _Adam._ Little brother Adam. “Um. No…” Sudden guilt throbbed in his temples, signaling a return of the headache he'd almost forgotten about. “Why, I mean, are you worried, is something…?”

“No, not…just wondering. I'll call him later to say hey. First week of school, all that crap. What are you up to?”

Sam blinked. Stretched his feet out in front of himself, inspected the mud clinging to the sides of his faded Chucks. He had a new pair of shoes waiting for him back in Palo Alto. They were sleek and stylish, Pumas like Zach and Brady always wore, only he'd chosen them in dark forest green. Subtle instead of flashy. He'd bought them at the beginning of the summer but hadn't brought them along, saving them for the start of the new semester. He couldn't believe that he'd be back in less than a week.

“I helped Jim re-ward the entire sanctuary today,” he told Dean, pulling his knees back up and resting his elbows on them. A bird started singing in the branches above him and he craned his neck, trying to spot it.

“Nice. He let you carve any of the big ones?”

“No, but I did most of the painting. I barely needed to use the book, either, it all came back to me so easily.”

“Like riding a bike, huh? It's gotta be that gigantor head of yours, same way you were always freakishly good at taking tests in school, too. Egghead.”

Sam grinned, a slow heat unfurling in his chest. “Where's Dad?” he asked, surprising himself with how natural the question sounded.

“Just left on a supply run,” Dean's words faded in and out around the sound of shuffling, a faint groan of bedsprings, then his voice was clear and present in Sam's ear again as he settled. “He'll be gone for a couple hours, I was gonna have a beer and watch porn but I had a feeling I'd just be hearing your bitchy voice in my head if I didn't check in first.”

Dean sounded so much like himself that Sam half-turned to his right, where Dean should be. Languid and content, this was Dean after a successful hunt where they saved the princess, ganked the monster, and his family was all in one piece.

All in one piece, maybe, but not all in one place. Dad was off god-knows where, Sam was holed up at Pastor Jim's, Adam was probably doing homework at the kitchen table. Dean was alone.

“Did the hunt give you any trouble?”

“Could have used you on recon if that's what you're asking.”

“You didn't even ask me to come with you.”

“Would you have? No,” Dean amended before Sam could answer. “It wouldn't've – Sammy, I couldn't have…could you have sat with Dad in the car knowing what we'd just, after we'd just…”

“No,” Sam answered honestly, needing only a second to consider and spending most of that second wondering why he was considering it only now. “I wish I was there now, though.”

“Yeah,” Dean said, his voice so quiet it was almost a sigh. “Me too.”

“Really?” Sam realized that he was pressing his phone to his cheek with both hands, made himself relax, rest one of them on his knee instead. He swallowed. “You do? Do you…are you…okay with it?”

“Not really,” Dean said, so easily that Sam almost missed the meaning behind the casual words. “It's ten kinds of wrong any way you look at it, and if anyone finds out, I mean _anyone_ , Sam—”

“I know that, Dean, but it doesn't—”

“Doesn't feel wrong,” Dean finished the sentence along with him, let the words hang between them for a heartbeat and a half before whispering, “I know. Sammy, I…”

Sam was holding his breath, let it all out in a rush at the sound Dean made then, that small pained sound of frustration and indecision that was his brother not wanting to ask for what he wanted. Sam swore softly under his breath, feeling dizzy, and pressed his hand to the center of his chest, eyes falling closed. “Fuck, Dean, I. I want you.” He barely recognized his own voice. “I want you. Is that okay? Please say it's okay, Dean.”

“Sammy, Sammy…” Dean's voice he recognized, more familiar than his own. He remembered the way Dean had murmured his name, kissed it into his skin and hair and wrapped him up in the sound of it. _Sammy, I'm crazy about you._ “It's okay, Sammy. It's okay. It's okay.”

“Yeah?” Sam slid his right hand down from his chest, pressing low on his belly, not touching where he really wanted to, some mote of self-preservation reminding him of the parsonage with its many windows that was fifty yards behind him. He shifted on the log, chin tucked into his chest, left hand enveloping his phone and keeping it from view, protecting this. Murmuring to his brother. “Do you want me? You want me too, right? Can we do it again, can we…will you kiss me again?”

Dean groaned, the sound shooting straight through Sam and he was touching himself now, shifting again until he could feel his dick through his jeans, breathing shallow and listening to Dean, to the creak of his motel bedsprings, the little hitching inhalations as he fought to keep control.

“You're killing me, little brother,” Dean said at last, words that Sam had heard from his lips a thousand times, infused now with something so unfathomable that Sam stopped breathing, spread his legs wider so he could squeeze himself harder, a small damp spot showing at the front of his jeans while little pulsing tremors raced through him. Dean groaned again. “I am definitely going to the special hell. I'm dying to see you, Sam, I'm dying to touch you.”

Sam's voice broke with his moan. He curled himself forward over his knees, wrapping his arm around his stomach though it hurt to stop touching himself. “Do it now,” he whispered into the phone. “Touch yourself now, pretend it's me. I want you to come thinking about me. Please, Dean, let me hear you.” Dean whimpered, and Sam heard the 'no' in his tone, his final scrap of resistance, the one Sam knew how to shred with a word. “Please, Dean. Please do it for me, please.”

It was nothing like overhearing Dean in the next room, or in the shower, or in the middle of the night. When his brother let go, it was as if all the miles vanished in the blink of an eye and he was there with him; he was there with Dean and Dean was letting him in completely and there was nothing left between them, not even air. Sam was gasping when it was over, rocked to his absolute core.

“You little pervert, Sammy,” Dean slurred, happy-drunk like a cat in a sunbeam and suddenly far, far away once again. “Who'd'a thought it, hm?”

Dean was all liquid and light while Sam was still wound up so tight a breeze might set him off if he let it, which he couldn't. His eyes were hot and itchy and he rubbed his palm against his sternum, his heart feeling ready to burst. “Will you come get me?” The question exploded out of him.

“What?” Dean asked around a yawn, then he must have dropped the phone, rustling sounds erupting in Sam's ear, making him pull the phone away while Dean swore, muffled and distant, until: “Sam? What'd you say?”

“Will you come and get me? Before I go back to school, can you make it back here before then? You could – you could drive me to the bus station.”

Dean was breathing steadily through his mouth, the sound so real and present in Sam's ear he thought he could feel it on his skin. The breeze lifted his hair and carried the faint sound of voices, happy chatter and laughter from the direction of the church. Sam squeezed his eyes shut, willing Dean to answer him.

“All right, yeah. I gotta get a couple hours shuteye here first but I'll take off tonight…there's some shitty construction around Chattanooga, I'll go around by Huntsville and head north. Twenty-one, twenty-two hours, tops.”

Sam sat quietly, listening to the birds and the wind and the indistinct conversation going on behind him.

“Okay,” he said finally. “Okay, Dean. That sounds good. I’ll see you soon.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This might hold the record for longest time any story has spent languishing in my drafts folder. I posted the first part in August 2015 and began working on part two shortly after. It’s been almost-complete for a solid five years, just waiting for me to finally write the scene that I’ve had in mind since I started part one all that time ago. 
> 
> Spoilers: I still haven’t written it. I found it hard to get back into the headspace of this story after so long, so I’ve decided to take pity on it and let it out into the world. If (when!) find my footing in this AU again, I’ll write the scene (it’s a good one, I swear! Tender and sexy and a little angsty, cuz it’s still the Winchesters) and post it as part three.
> 
> Thanks for reading ♥ Click over to my (woefully undermaintained) [blog](https://leboncanon.wordpress.com/) if you'd like to check out my non-fanfic fiction.


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